Inside a green billionaire's crusade

The California billionaire spent nearly that much from his personal fortune to make an example of Republican Ken Cuccinelli for his arch-conservative views on the environment. The sum is more than three times the investment that’s been previously reported, and it nearly matched what the Republican Governors Association, the largest GOP outside spender, put into the Virginia governor’s race. It is more money, on a per-vote basis, than the famously prolific conservative donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent in the 2012 presidential election.

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Steyer’s political committee, NextGen Climate Action, publicly entered the Virginia race in August by paying to air a wave of television ads produced by Democratic Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe’s campaign. The spots blistered Cuccinelli for launching an investigation into the research activities of a University of Virginia climate scientist.

What unfolded in the ensuing months was an overwhelming flood of spending from the coffers of a single donor determined to inject climate into a race in which state education and transportation issues, and a federal government shutdown, almost certainly played a more decisive role. Steyer paid for $3.1 million in TV advertising, $1.2 million in digital ads, 12 different pieces of campaign mail, a field program that hit 62,000 households on get-out-the-vote weekend and even a Cuccinelli impersonator who showed up at public events carrying a briefcase of mock cash to attack the Republican’s ethics.

During the final three months of the race, POLITICO had extensive behind-the-scenes access to Steyer’s shadow campaign. Along with the smaller seven-figure sum Steyer spent in a Massachusetts special election earlier this year, his Virginia campaign represents a down payment on a sustained effort to defeat Republicans who question climate science — and activate voters who want government action on climate change.

Indeed, Steyer and his advisers say this is only the beginning. He has established himself in short order as the closest thing Democrats have to the Adelsons or the even deeper-pocketed conservatives Charles and David Koch. In other words, an individual with essentially boundless resources who is determined to force change upon politicians through the aggressive use of his checkbook.

Steyer told POLITICO after McAuliffe’s 2.5-percentage-point win that he didn’t consider his spending excessive in the least.

“One of my friends who is a Democratic governor and knew what we spent said, ‘I think you overspent on this campaign.’ But it turned out we didn’t,” Steyer said. “We kept going with what we originally thought we needed to do for the turnout, which was our whole goal.”

The Steyer operation wasn’t the only environmentalist outfit that played heavily in Virginia: The Virginia League of Conservation Voters PAC and the Sierra Club both invested money and manpower. Among the groups that cared about climate, however, Steyer’s was surely the most extravagantly financed and the most ruthless.

The animated 56-year-old has exhibited a flair for the theatrical in his political activities: A fan of cowboy Westerns who named his son for a character in “Lonesome Dove,” Steyer challenged a Massachusetts Senate candidate last spring to denounce the Keystone XL pipeline by “high noon on Friday.” In Virginia, he paid to fly an airplane banner reading “Cuccinelli Says Go BYU” over an August football game between UVA and Brigham Young University.

In a memo distributed to potential financial supporters late in the summer, Steyer’s top strategist, former Clinton White House aide Chris Lehane, said NextGen will build on its Virginia campaign by targeting multiple Senate and gubernatorial races in 2014 – and then playing hard in the 2016 presidential primaries.

“We want to establish a real presence in the early states to impact the candidates and make climate a top-tier issue, whereby candidates are forced to put forth comprehensive climate policies and address the issue,” Lehane wrote.

The game plan

From the start, Steyer’s campaign had two stated goals: electing Democrat Terry McAuliffe as the governor of Virginia, and creating a case study for making climate change an issue in high-profile elections.

A third, unstated goal has run through all of Steyer’s political activities: turning a hedge fund investor from the Bay Area into a national political figure. Most megadonors prize their privacy. But before Steyer’s team jumped into the Virginia race, it approached POLITICO about providing exclusive access to NextGen’s activities for a feature story after the election. In 2013, the towheaded, all-smiles Democratic financier has participated in major profiles in both The New Yorker and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

For all the attention his political spending has earned him, Steyer himself took a relatively hands-off attitude toward NextGen’s Virginia campaign, deferring to a roster of blue-chip consultants that included strategists from the TV firm GMMB, the mail firm Mission Control and voter-contact firms Grassroots Solutions and Winning Connections.

One adviser likened Steyer to a “chairman of the board,” who sets big-picture goals more than he dictates operational decisions. During a visit to Virginia in early August, as his consultants urged him to move up his plans to fund TV ads in the race, Steyer repeatedly said he’d prefer to follow Lehane’s lead. “Have you asked Chris?” he asked at one meeting, shrugging: “I don’t think my opinion on this is particularly wise or valuable.”

Of course Steyer’s opinion, as his PR consultant Mike Casey reminded him, is of great consequence to the group he funds. And in the big picture of the Virginia race, the onetime Obama campaign bundler handed down a few clear directives to his team:

Win the race by turning out apathetic voters. Force climate change into the campaign and seize a “mandate” on the issue. And don’t just rely on television ads (“The whole thing about paid TV is you feel like you’re doing something,” Steyer mused skeptically to POLITICO over the summer, before going on to make TV ads the largest piece of NextGen’s budget.)

From the outset, the challenge for Steyer’s strategists was to make climate part of the Virginia conversation in a way that was relevant to voters in an off-year election. NextGen commissioned a poll over the summer from Benenson Strategy Group that tested 2,500 voters to reveal a stark conclusion: Virginians care about climate, but probably not enough for the issue to turn them out singlehandedly in a governor’s race.

To reach the voters Steyer wanted to turn out – Virginians who may have voted in the 2012 presidential election or the 2009 governor’s race but couldn’t be counted on to vote this year – pollster Amy Levin urged the billionaire to put climate in terms that related to the daily lives of Virginians. She suggested talking about the effects of climate on asthma rates and food prices, and eschewing activist buzzwords like “climate denier” in favor of the charge that Cuccinelli “denies basic science.”

Erin Lehane, the field marshal of the NextGen turnout program, put it in these terms: “We’ve got to hit [voters] on a place where they have an emotional response, and their emotional response is to [the message], ‘This guy’s a wild man and we’ve got to do something.’”

Nuking Cuccinelli

When the NextGen digital and mail campaigns ramped up in September and October, that kitchen-sink approach was immediately evident, as the Steyer gang’s message tore at Cuccinelli on multiple issues with climate at the center. “From wasting taxpayer money in a failed lawsuit against UVA because he disagreed with their climate change research to opposing birth control, Ken Cuccinelli is out of touch,” read one mailer that went out in mid-September.

Multiple mail pieces that went out in mid-October noted not only that Cuccinelli disputes climate science “even though NASA and 98% of climate scientists agree that it is a real danger,” they also said he wants “to eliminate all forms of birth control” and wanted to “let criminals, even those convicted of sexually abusing children, buy guns at gun shows.”

Digital ads explicitly appealed to voters who may not have considered themselves especially climate-conscious. At a post-election briefing for Steyer on Wednesday, digital strategist Tara McGowan showcased a series of Web ads beginning with the text: “I’m no environmentalist …”

In each case, the sentence ended with something like: “… but droughts are ruining my farm” or “… but science doesn’t lie.”

All the while, Erin Lehane’s turnout operation was going door to door, particularly in Virginia’s coastal Hampton Roads area and on six college campuses throughout the state, hammering away at the message that Cuccinelli is an extremist on the environment and, well, everything else.

By the end of September, they were sending out 50 canvassers a day along the Virginia coast, recruiting military veterans and African-Americans representative of the local community. By the end of the race, the field component of NextGen had collected 10,000 pledge cards on college campuses — asking voters to commit to participating on Nov. 5 — and hit 62,000 doors in the days immediately before the vote.

“We are not talking to people with a climate-exclusive message,” Lehane explained on Sept. 30. “We’re saying, this guy is not representative because he denies science and then we kind of follow it up with, ‘He opposes all forms of birth control and he does this and he does that.’”